Are infiltrators any good? I find sniping completely useless in this game and the cloak is complete garbage, I notice enemy infiltrators who use it and I can still see them easily. Am I better of going engineer/medic/light assault or should I stay as a infiltrator?
1) Well there is the armor cloak, which provides more than just the hiding of the Stalker cloak that you dislike. For CQC in a post-SMG era, the alternate cloak has started to gain in popularity. 2) How important is hacking to you? Seriously, that's the question. Do you value being able to steal control of enemy terminals for your team? Just how often do you steal control of enemy turrets and use them as your primary weapon? The answer to your question depends on your answers to the questions above. Most people will say that a non-sniping Infiltrator isn't worth it. There are reasons why I'm the only one hacking terminals when I'm in a small zerg of 5-10 people. Many people don't have medals that results from using turrets. I would personally say that Infiltrator is flawed, but good because I enjoy it and the class fullfills a hole that is ignored by most PS2 players. Having said that, the class really isn't the most attractive. If you're a CQC Infiltrator who doesn't cloak, then you could still get Anti-Personal Mines on an Engineer and keep your existing playstyle. While you can no longer hack terminals / turrets, you'll gain so much more to replace what you've lost. (There's a reason why the 2nd class that I started upgrading was the Engineer.)
if you find sniping and the cloak useless then you know your answer already. Infiltrator is a poorly done, up class with low utility and pathetic xp gain.
The cloak is there to help you, but not do the job for you. People tend to expect too much out of it and use it haphazardly, but it's there to lower your profile, not make you invisible. If your preconceptions come from BF3 or CoD you might be a little disappointed in their combat prowess to start. That said, Infiltrator's can be pretty good once you get the hang of it, but If you're not enjoying yourself or you find it frustrating, try something else. The beauty of the game is you're never locked into one class and can jump between them at any time, so there's nothing stopping you from going back to it in the future if a situation arises where you feel it would be more of use. Being new to the game, look into medic or engineer as something to get a foothold into the game. Since both are decent combatants, and fulfil vital support roles that provide XP incentives, which can really help get some early certs to help you out, even if you want to spend them on other classes. As an engineer your ammo packs, repair tool, and short-range carbines, and deployable can make you an asset on base defenses and vehicle pushes. Giving ammo to teammates is a great way to make certs without really doing anything and with the way most players burn through mags it's an absolute godsend. Combat medics pack assault rifles, which are pretty solid and versitile weapons. You can use your healing aura to heal yourself increasing your survivablility as well as your teammates, but using your healing tool to top off your teammates or rez them can relly build you up fast. Each rez is worth 3/4xp of a kill. Just keep in mind that until you upgrade your healing tool (which is pretty inexpensive) people will only rez with 10% hp and will need more healing to top them off (which is more XP for you). Light assaults only have access to carbines and shotguns, so they play to the close game. You use jetpack and evasion to close the gaps and take out targets. I find spending some time doing this can help learn some of the more evasive habits that would eventually be complimented by the infiltrator's cloak should you return to infi. And finally don't discount heavy assault since this is the best way to take out vehicles without needing an investment, and have some of the best straight up combat weapons in the game, not to mention their overshields. Most important: Just make sure you're having fun. If you're having fun, you'll undoubtedly be doing something useful.
the infiltrator does need to be looked at, the exp gain needs to be adjusted, maybe make hacking a more profitable gain and alter spotting to be more beneficial for an infiltrator to do it, longer spot last and higher spot exp gain for infiltrators, sniping i find to be okay, its really a flanking procedure to deal with more stationary targets, i feel that scope sway needs to be adjusted, less for lower power scopes more for higher power and scope sway on all weapons with a x6 or up, as for cloaking, its quite clear that the cloak as it is is a rendering bug on lower settings, as for higher settings its functional as an additional camouflage, but still needs tuning in terms of rendering, lastly when it comes to utility and role in battle i feel there is a large potential for the infiltrator to become a very useful support class, if the devs choose to give the infiltrator a choice between sniping and actual infiltration, which, looking at the current setup i would say is relativity likely,
The only other thing that I have to add to this subject is that the Stalker Cloak makes you disappear from Scout Radar and the Infiltrator's radar darts. Since you're able to constantly use the Stalker so often, it means that you can really sneak through radar heavy zones. When you think about just how many people use 100m Scout Radar on a Flash and 200m Scout Radar on their ESF, that can be life altering for your playing experience.
Infils are amazing. ♥ my Inf builds I have long range sniper, mid range, and CQB smg That said, it can be a difficult class to use effectively. LA and HA are the easier combat classes. Medic and Engy are easiest for xp. Medic also gets the AR which are really nice. If you play an infil poorly... ur gonna get stomped
Was about to post this in the other thread you made about this topic in general discussion before it got locked. - Hacking is awesome, it can turn a single infiltrator into a full out assault with multiple mobile spawns in a few seconds. - Stealth works. It's not magic invisibility and it requires a bit of knowledge to use correctly. But if you do, you can traverse even the crown with ease. - Sniping is perfect with the new render values. My new record headshot is at 425m. A single sniper can lock down any infantry assaulting/defending a base and is a big asset to your team. And then you have Bouncing Betties and the Recon Tool, which makes the Infiltrator the best insurgency/counter-insurgency class there is in PS2.
The Infiltrator, like other classes, are amazing if you know what you are doing. The infil probably have the highest Skill-requirement, meaning that few actually realize its true potential, but it is rewarded with massive killstreaks if you master it.
I try to play infiltrator when possible. I play SMG infiltrator mostly and have began to really examine what I do right, what I do wrong, etc. I have a few gameplay videos up on twitch and youtube if you're interested.
The cloak doesn't work. What it does do, is convince people that the Infiltrator is somehow better at stealth gameplay than its peers by encouraging them to sneak around more often. At most, and I won't deny that this is powerful, it makes you immune to spotting. The actual decrease to your visibility in other situations is negligible, and amounts at best to a way to slap a non-faction specific texture on your guy so that the inattentive may not immediately recognize you as an enemy. If you want to sneak around, just do it. You don't need to play this class for that, so if you don't care about hacking terminals, don't want to drop vast quantities of certs into your recon detect device, and don't enjoy sniping, just stay away. Play literally any other class and you'll get access to C4 - play Heavy Assault or Engineer, and you won't even need someone else's help to kill Sunderers.
It enhances your sneaking abilities by a lot, especially coupled with the RDD. Yeah, it's no PS1 stealth suit. Nobody ever said it would be, though.
Highly visible in 3/4 scenarios. This piece of trash doesn't enhance my sneaking abilities at all. My ability to avoid enemy lines of sight is not even remotely improved by it, and since I don't trust it to protect me when I'm in an enemy's line of sight, it also doesn't open up a single new option for me. Literally the only thing I ever turn it on for is when I'm either far away from a base at nighttime when I know the sound won't give me away and I won't need to do any shooting (the only situation where there is virtually no consequence to turning it on), or when I get caught and spotted, and want that red IFF marker to disappear from my head so I can actually escape without my pursuer having his usual advantage over me.
2/4 of those are a bug and the last quarter is simply bad gameplay. You don't sprint into the enemy's LoS, not even with an active cloak. If that guy sat in a corner instead he would be very hard to detect. I've managed to hide in plain sight while a whole squad of TR passed me by, simply by the virtue of not moving.
Yet another person who doesn't understand that there will never be balance between low and medium/high graphics settings. Why am I not surprised? Suffice it to say that even if this "bug" is fixed, all we're going back to is a world where people on low can't see Infiltrators at all. Right. So avoiding enemy lines of sight - avoiding situations where your cloak would actually be doing something - is the best way to sneak around. Got it. Great idea about hiding, though - shame that you're still visible when doing it and you only get a maximum of 12 seconds before the cloak turns off, huh?
Maybe you should reconsider your outlook on the game, or a permanent leave. I get that you're disappointed, but that's no reason to imply that I'm stupid simply because I disagree. That visibility bug wasn't there before, and it will get fixed. Will people still get an advantage out of low setting and will they need that crutch to compete - who knows? That cloak is not some kind of magic invisibility, it helps you to conceal yourself. You're nearly impossible to spot when running along at medium to long range, but at ranges under 20m - do I really need to explain that? Infiltrators are designed to get into enemy held bases with the least amount of detection, and they ability set helps with that. But it's stated nowhere that your cloak is supposed to enable you to run up to someone and slap him in the face while invisible. The cloak is no excuse for not playing smart. I don't know, maybe use one of the gazillion other entrances?
The suit should be at the level of invis it is at when standing still AT ALL TIMES. Also when you are stealthed you should gain a 30% speed boost so you can actully infiltrate enemy bases. You should be able to cert so that the invis is perma when standing still so you can actually snipe without getting one shotted by a vehicle. They also need infa red scopes so you can actually snipe at night.
Also, Infiltrators should get Orbital Strikes as primary and secondary armarment, an aimbot linked into their suit and a tactical grenade that disconnects all enemy players in the radius, which should be the size of a biolab dome. /sarcasm Get real!
On medium/high graphics, the cloak uses a light refraction shader which causes its user to adopt a texture identical to his or her background from the user's perspective, only bent to be out of place. This means that the colors which make up the Infiltrator's texture are the exact value, intensity, and saturation of those in the environment. As the viewer's distance to the Infiltrator increases, the refraction becomes less obvious both because it represents a smaller portion of their screen, and because fine texture details in the background become hard to distinguish and even disappear due to LOD optimization. On the other hand, the Infiltrator becomes much easier to see in close range and especially while in motion because the refraction is large and visibly changing, making it far more obvious. On low graphics, the Infiltrator's model is replaced with a transparent silhouette. While the background is still visible behind him or her, its intensity is changed to be either darker or lighter in accordance with how transparent the Infiltrator is. This effect is not diminished even slightly based on distance, and unlike the medium/high shader, becomes much easier to see against mono-colored backgrounds which naturally occur at great distances for the reasons mentioned above. In close range, however, sufficiently low transparencies will ensure that the Infiltrator is scarcely seen at all when moving, as there is no aid to help pick up motion. This isn't about a bug. This is about two fundamentally different graphics settings being wholly incompatible with each other. Can you tell which setting your enemy is using? Because that's the information you would need to make a decision about how best to use your cloak. It helps in a way which I cannot rely upon, because my opponents are the ones who have their skill tested if they see me using it. I am far more consistently successful when I never even touch my cloak aside from the previously mentioned circumstances - avoiding lines of sight doesn't give my enemies an opportunity to see through a highly visible shader effect and shoot me while I have my fire button locked. Hunter Stealth does.
